The first large medical study of female genital cutting has found that the procedure has deadly consequences when the women give birth, raising by more than 50 percent the likelihood that the woman or her baby will die.

Rates of serious medical complications surrounding childbirth, such as bleeding, also rose substantially in women who had undergone genital cutting, according to new research being published today in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

"Reliable evidence about its harmful effects, especially on reproduction, should contribute to the abandonment of the practice," wrote the study's authors, all members of the World Health Organization Study Group on Female Genital Mutilation and Obstetrical Outcome.

While women's groups and human rights organizations have long campaigned against genital cutting as a rights issue, the study provides the first conclusive medical evidence of long-term physical harm, moving the debate further into the public health arena.

"Finally we have data to prove what health workers have long known: that female genital mutilation is a health issue, a killer of women and children, as well as a human rights issue," said Adrienne Germain, president of the International Women's Health Coalition, in New York....

As a nine-year-old growing up in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, Awezan Nuri narrowly escaped female genital mutilation. “My mother was 12 when she was mutilated,” says the 31-year-old women’s rights campaigner, who is also a renowned poet. “She has told me about the terrible pain, how much she bled that night and how ashamed she was to tell her family she was hurting. She couldn’t talk to her mother, because her mother was the one who’d taken her to be cut. She felt alone and scared.”

Despite the trauma of that experience, Nuri’s mother still pushed for her six daughters to undergo the same process themselves. “She thought it was the responsibility of every Sunni Muslim to do this. Logically, she disagreed with it, but there was so much pressure from society.”

It is a misguided belief among Muslim communities in dozens of countries around the world that the practice is mandated in Islam. For Nuri, it was an intervention by her father that saved her sisters from the knife – he said he did not agree with it. But most Iraqi Kurds are not so lucky. Figures from the Pana Centre – of which Nuri is vice president, in charge of the campaign against female genital mutilation (FGM) – show that 38 per cent of women in Kirkuk are victims. Among ethnic Kurds, that figure rises to 65 per cent...

A center to treat victims of female genital mutilation has opened in Berlin. The Desert Flower Medical Center was opened by the former supermodel and activist Waris Dirie, who was herself a victim of female circumcision.

Opened on Wednesday, the Desert Flower Medical Center will offer reconstructive surgery and psychological help to victims of female circumcision or FGM from around the world.

The center, located in Berlin's "Waldfriede" hospital, claims to be the first of its kind in the world. Its chief surgeon Roland Scherer told news agency AFP the clinic plans to treat between 50 and 100 women a year. It will serve as a pilot for other planned facilities in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

The first UK prosecutions over female genital mutilation (FGM) have been announced by British authorities, nearly three decades after the practice was made illegal.

Dr Dhanoun Dharmasena, 31, of east London, has been charged over a surgery in 2012 in which he was alleged to have re-performed a genital mutilation on a woman after she gave birth at a London hospital.

"Having carefully considered all the available evidence, I have determined there is sufficient evidence and it would be in the public interest to prosecute Dr Dhanuson Dharmasena," said Alison Saunders, director of public prosecutions.

Another man, Hasan Mohamed, 40, from north London, also faces a charge of intentionally encouraging female genital mutilation.

It was not immediately clear what Mohamed's relationship to the victim was, but he is not a healthcare professional.

Both Dharmasena and Mohamed will appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on April 15.

MPs say it is 'unforgiveable' laws only used now

MPs have said it is unforgiveable these are the first prosecutions since laws against the practice were introduced.

It is estimated that 2-3 million girls worldwide are at risk of mutilation each year in Africa alone, while authorities say it is hard to know how common the practice is in countries where it is outlawed, including Australia, which has seen very few prosecutions for the crime.

Jaha Dukureh lies collapsed across a two-seater sofa in the living room of her father’s house in Serekunda, the Gambia. A fan attempts to break through the stifling mid-afternoon air. Sitting here, waiting, she knows she is about to open the closed box of her own history for the first time, and speak to her father about the practice that put a blade to her flesh when she was just a week old.

A few days ago and 4,000 miles away, in a very different air-conditioned room in Washington DC, the 24-year-old stood up to speak to advisers of the Obama administration. She explained that, as a baby, she had been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM): her clitoris cut off and her vagina sealed, with only a small hole remaining for urine and menstruation. She warned that American teenagers were still being subjected to this practice, taken to their parents’ countries of origin to be cut in preparation for marriage.